Blogs from Rotorua, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 98

Trek in Waitomo Everyday's a Saturday Great views. Muddy track. Another short and easy drive to Waitomo. Famous for its gloworm caves. I didn't want to spend $95 to float/swim/wade through a cave so I opted for the free option of going on a walk with Jasper, Paul and Cornelia. A really lovely walk through the trees and farms too even though it was pretty muddy out there since it rained all of last night. But during our walk the rains had stopped. So that was nice. Well except for a short period of time where it did start raining for about 10 minutes when we were walking through one of the fields. There were a few spots where we saw a small taste of the caves - but no gloworms. We bumped into one group ... read more

Hi again, A land of two halves - thats what New Zealand is. In fact it could almost be two separate countries. In fact it almost literally is given the fact that a tectonic plate boundary runs right down the middle creating a landscape smattered with dormant (I prefer the term 'quietly waiting') volcanoes, earthquakes (there are over 15000 a year), geysers, bubbling mud pools and steaming vents. Its very different. I left Christchurch on a high with the Jack Johnson gig. It was excellent. I don't know if he's made it over in the UK, but one-half of his support act, G-Love (glove?) definitely should. He was great. Good to meet up with some mates I had met earlier as well. Spent a bit of time in Wellington, butI I'm not going to talk about ... read more

After the short prologue for the thermal area that we had in "craters of the moon", we continued on Wednesday to some more REAL stuff - smelly and beautiful nature. We left Taupo in the morning to go to a place called "Orakei Korako". The place is full of these thermal things - one geyser that didn't come out for us... but there were amazing silica terraces, which are terraces in beautiful colors, white, yellow, red, and steam coming from the ground everywhere. One area there is called "the artist's palette" because the ground is so colorful. There are also mud pools with boiling mud and also boiling water pools - amazing. From there we continued north towards the "capital city of the sulphur smell" - Rotorua. On the way we stopped for a short walk ... read more

Well we have been on the road for a month now and we feel like we have already done so much, I hope these journals testify to that. One month in so we thought we'd take stock of the money we've spent, just to check that were sticking to the budget and that. Well to our surprise we've spent double our allocated budget in the first month, and we thought we were being quite tight too, San Francisco apart. It was hard to budget for this trip, so many places, so many currencies, so many different adventures. As a rule of thumb we decided on whatever the daily rent was that would also be our daily spending money - if the rent was $60 we could afford to spend that on living expenses for the day. ... read more

HELLO ALL!! Well we're still in one piece and have managed not to kill one another so its all good. We've had a few bumps such as trying to put up the tent on Thursday night, full of enthusiasm for the first nights camping, and realising that there was no fly sheet in the tent bag!!! Whoops. Cold night by the beach, but the nice guy in Rebel Sports gave us a free one so its sorted now. The flight to Auckland was delayed by an hour or so while we were on the plane as all the power went so we just pretended that our flight was 4 hours instead of 2 1/2. We stayed in a hostel in Ponsonby called Verandahs and it was the best. Small and cosy and v friendly. Sent in ... read more